National Comic Book Day: Iron Man, FOOM, and the Seeds I Never Sold

A Day for the Medium That Hooked Millions

National Comic Book Day lands on September 25, and it celebrates a hugely influential storytelling form of the last century. Comics are often dismissed as kid stuff. That has always been unfair. The medium gave us modern mythology, trained millions of kids to love reading, and built characters that now power the biggest movies on Earth.

Comic books as we know them took off in the late 1930s. Superman arrived in 1938 and all but invented the superhero. The 1960s brought the Marvel explosion, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko building Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, and the X-Men, heroes who had real problems and real flaws. That was the leap. Before Marvel, heroes were mostly perfect. After Marvel, they had rent to pay and people to disappoint, and that made them stick.

I was there for a lot of it as a reader, and the rack at the corner store was the best part of my week.

Watch: The Insane History of Marvel Comics | Full Documentary, Elijah Joseph

I Had Them From the Early Issues

I picked up comic books when I was very young. Young enough that I probably had Iron Man and Spider-Man and a pile of others from their early issues, the ones collectors would lose their minds over now. I didn’t know they’d be worth anything. I just loved them.

And I lost them. All of them, over the years. I’m not going to give you the usual story about how my mother threw them away, because that’s what everybody says and it’s not what happened to me. I just lost them the way you lose things across a childhood and a lot of moves. Some scattered, some vanished, and the collection slowly disappeared.

The real heartbreak came later. At some point I had so many comics, boxes and boxes and boxes, that I hauled them to a comic shop to sell. They offered me a nickel each. A nickel. After saving these things for years, hauling them around, keeping them, that was the verdict.

So I dumped whatever was left in the trash. I’ve thought about that a lot since, watching what old comics sell for now. But that’s how it goes. The things you save aren’t always the things that pay off, and you rarely know which is which at the time.

The Characters I Loved, and the One I Didn’t

I loved the stories and I loved the characters. Iron Man, Thor, the Incredible Hulk, the whole Marvel side pulled me in. Those heroes had weaknesses and tempers and bad days, and that made them feel believable even in a world of gods and armor.

Then there was Superman, and I was never crazy about him. Here’s my problem, and it’s a storytelling problem.

Superman is unbeatable. He’s so powerful that no ordinary threat means anything to him. And an unbeatable hero is a boring hero. If nothing can really hurt him, where are the stakes? The whole tension of a story comes from the possibility of failure, and a character who can’t lose has nothing to fight for.

Writers have spent decades inventing magic rocks and contrived threats just to give Superman a fair fight. That tells you the core design has a problem. Give me a hero who can bleed. That’s a hero I can worry about.

How the Crossovers Drove Me Out

I didn’t drift away from comics. They pushed me out, and I can tell you exactly how. Somewhere in the 1980s and 1990s, the publishers got an idea. Instead of telling a story in one title, they started letting stories wander across titles. At first it was small, a Spider-Man cameo in an Iron Man book.

Then the overlaps grew. Then they built these enormous threaded events where a single story ran through dozens of different titles at once, and you had to buy all of them to follow all of it. Forty different books to read one story. It got expensive fast, and the prices kept climbing on top of it. Then the graphic novels arrived to continue the threads, another purchase, another tier.

I hit a wall. I got completely overwhelmed. The thing I loved had turned into homework with a huge bill attached, and they’d managed to force so much reading on me that I stopped reading altogether. I just dropped comics. Walked away from the whole hobby.

The irony is heavy. They wanted me to buy everything, and by demanding everything, they lost me completely. There’s a lesson in that for anyone who makes things for an audience. You can ask too much.

FOOM and the Back-Page Schemes

A couple of memories capture how deep I was in, and how comics were a whole little world beyond the stories. I subscribed to FOOM. That stood for Friends of Ol’ Marvel. It was Marvel’s own fan magazine, launched in 1973, full of behind-the-scenes news and art about the comics and creators.

I had a few issues and found them interesting, a peek behind the curtain at the people making the stuff I loved. Stan Lee was the voice of all that, the carnival barker of Marvel fandom, talking straight to readers in his columns in a way that made you feel like part of a club. I lost those too, naturally.

Then there were the back pages. They were their own special racket. The ads promised X-ray glasses that let you see through things. I bought a pair. They were completely fake, just a cheap optical trick in the plastic lenses, and you could see through exactly nothing.

And there was the Burpee seed deal. You’d get a box of seed packets to sell door to door, and the more you sold, the bigger the prize. The prize I wanted was a microscope that looked amazing in the ad. So at ten or eleven, I went out and worked the whole neighborhood. I must have knocked on a hundred doors. I sold zero packets. Not one. Nobody even bought a pack out of pity.

In the end my parents bought the entire box themselves so I could get the prize, and the microscope turned out to be a horrible little tube with a single cheap lens, useless and disappointing. I still have it, as a monument to false advertising. I never ordered anything off the back of a comic book again. Lesson learned, the hard way, for a quarter and a box of unsold seeds.

What do comics teach about writing?

For all my complaining, comics made me a reader and taught me real things about storytelling. The first lesson is that flawed heroes beat perfect ones every time. The reason Marvel buried the competition in the 1960s is that their heroes had problems, the same thing that makes a good anti-hero work.

Spider-Man couldn’t pay rent. The Hulk was his own worst enemy. Iron Man was a mess inside the armor. Vulnerability is what makes a character matter, and the unbeatable Superman problem proves the point from the other direction. Give your hero a real weakness or you give the reader no reason to worry.

The second lesson is economy. A comic tells a whole story in a few panels per page. Every image has to count, every line of dialogue has to justify its space.

That compression is fantastic training for a writer. Comics taught me to make each beat count and to trust the reader to fill the gap between the panels, and that’s what white space and a fast scene do in prose.

The third lesson is the one the crossovers taught by getting it wrong. Respect your audience’s time and wallet. A story should reward attention. The moment you force readers to buy forty things to understand one thing, you’ve stopped serving the story and started serving the cash register, and people feel it.

Serve the story, and the audience stays. Bleed them, and they leave, the way I did. So on September 25, grab a comic, the simpler the better, and watch how much story fits in those panels. The medium that gave us Iron Man and Spider-Man also taught a couple of generations how stories work. Mine included, nickel valuation and all.

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